A New-Era Renault in the Remaking

By BRAD SPURGEON

March 27, 2014

After dominating Formula One for the last four years — powering the Red Bull car and Sebastian Vettel to four straight drivers’ and constructors’ titles — the Renault Formula One engine manufacturer began the new era of hybrid power units on what appeared to be the brink of failure this season.

At 2014 winter testing, Renault started with the least reliable and slowest of the new 1.6-liter, 6-cylinder, turbo-charged hybrid engines.

But then, after just 12 days of testing and refining its engine, one of the cars powered by it, the Red Bull of Daniel Ricciardo, finished second at the season-opening, Australian Grand Prix on March 16. Although Ricciardo was subsequently disqualified for an excessive fuel-flow infringement, the result seemed to indicate that Renault, if not dominant, will be a challenger again.

So few, if any, of those in the paddock at the Malaysian Grand Prix in Sepang this weekend are underestimating the French company’s ability to rebound and dominate again.

The Renault engine is the third-most successful in Formula One history, with 165 victories, behind Ferrari with 222 and Ford Cosworth with 176. Since it joined the series in 1977 with a revolutionary turbo engine, Renault has also been one of the most innovative manufacturers.

From introducing that original turbo engine to creating the best of the V-10 atmospheric engines of the 1990s — which powered the winning Benetton and Williams teams — up to the recent domination of the Red Bull, Renault, as Frank Williams, the owner of the Williams team, once said, “has racing in its blood.”

It has also proven that it knows how to rebound from failure. In the early part of last decade, for example, it briefly created an innovative, yet failed, V-10 with a large, 110-degree-angle V, only to return with the V-10 that would dominate in 2005 and the V-8 that won the following season and then these past four years.

“We are in Formula One in order to sell Renault technology, in order to sell more Renault road cars,” said Jean-Michel Jalinier, the director of Renault Sport, the wholly owned subsidiary that builds the racing engines.

At the same time, the Renault car company is on a mission to downsize road car engines, reduce fuel consumption and limit pollution. So when Formula One announced its plan to do all of those things, moving from a normally aspirated 2.4-liter, V-8 engine with a single kinetic-energy-recovery system to a smaller hybrid model with heat- and kinetic-recovery systems, Renault elected to stay in the series that had never been greeted with much enthusiasm from the company’s director, Carlos Ghosn.

The current lag behind the other two engine manufacturers in the series, Mercedes and Ferrari, has been difficult.

“We are less well prepared than we should be and than we would have wanted to be,” Rob White, the technical director of the program for Renault Sport, said in an interview at the Australian Grand Prix. “But there is a lot to be extremely positive about. The new regulations are at least very close, if not bang on target, to delivering everything that they should have done, in terms of a race car that is the same in terms of the overall level of performance with a level of fuel consumption that is substantially reduced.”

Renault Sport is based in the Paris suburb of Viry-Chatillon, not far from the Renault car manufacturer’s road car laboratory, the Technocenter, in Guyancourt, another Paris suburb. Renault Sport has built its Formula One — and some other racing engines — in the same factory in France since its founding in 1975, while providing those engines to teams based in England. Today Renault Sport works more closely than ever with the road car company, with 30 engineers from the road car company based in Viry-Chatillon, and it uses some of the Technocenter’s tools.

“We try to exchange on methodology, working practices particularly,” White said. “There are some types of problems that we have that have been experienced elsewhere and we try to take advantage of the Renault know-how. One of the things where we have help has been in the electrical traction and high-power electronic field, where Renault have considerable skilled experience.”

Unlike the Mercedes and Ferrari engine manufacturers, which also have their own teams and cars, Renault sells its engines to teams — Red Bull, Lotus, Caterham and Toro Rosso this season. Any problems can only be found, therefore, once the engine has been fitted in a chassis.

“The biggest thing is getting all of the pieces to work together, and, above all, to work together in a way that makes the engine drivable for the driver,” White said.

“The drivers are extremely demanding,” he added, “and in the case of a normally aspirated 8-cylinder engine that they have been driving with for a number of years, if there is a torque hesitation, a gap in time, between a requested torque from the engine and the delivered torque from the engine of more than a few tens of milliseconds, then the drivers get sore.”